Tom Raworth
Encyclopedia
Tom Raworth (born 1938) is a London-born poet
and visual artist who has published over forty books of poetry and prose since 1966. His works has been translated and published in many countries. Raworth is a key figure in the British Poetry Revival
. He lives in Brighton, England
.
. He left school at the age of sixteen and worked at a variety of jobs. In the early 1960s he started a magazine called Outburst in which he published a number of British
and American poets including Ed Dorn
, Allen Ginsberg
and LeRoi Jones. He also founded Matrix Press at this time, publishing small books by Dorn, David Ball http://www.literarytranslators.org/ball.html, Piero Heliczer :de:Piero Heliczer and others.
In 1965,while working as an operator at the international telephone exchange, Raworth and Barry Hall set up Goliard Press (later Cape Goliard), which published, amongst others, Charles Olson
's first British collection. These ventures into publishing made a major contribution to British interest to the new American poetry of the 1960s.
. Donald Davie
admired the book and encouraged Raworth to resume his formal education. Raworth studied Spanish
for a year and then translated the work of Vicente Huidobro
and other Latin American poets for his M.A..
In the 1970s, he worked in the United States
and Mexico
, first teaching in universities in Ohio, Chicago and Texas, and later living in San Francisco where he was involved with the Zephyrus Image press. After six years abroad he returned with his family to England
in 1977 to take up the post of resident poet in King's College, Cambridge
for a year. In 2007 he was awarded the Antonio Delfini :it:Antonio Delfini prize for lifetime achievement, in Modena, Italy. He now lives in Brighton
, Sussex.
His early poetry showed the influences of the Black Mountain
and New York School
poets, particularly Robert Creeley
and John Ashbery
together with strands from Europe
an poetry (Apollinaire
), Dada
, and Surrealism
. His 1974 book Ace saw Raworth move to a more disjunctive style, built from short, unpunctuated lines that entice the reader into following multiple syntactic possibilities, as they knit together everything from observations of the everyday to self-reflexive commentary on the acts of thinking and writing, to affectionate lifts from pulp fiction and film noir, to political satire. A series of long poems in this mode followed—after Ace came Writing (composed 1975-77; published 1982), Catacoustics (composed 1978-81; published 1991) and West Wind (composed 1982-83; published 1984). Subsequent projects have extended this mode into a kaleidoscopic sequence of 14-line poems (not exactly "sonnets") that extended through "Sentenced to Death" (in Visible Shivers, 1987), Eternal Sections (1993) and Survival (1994). Later collections include Clean & Well Lit (1996), Meadow (1999), Caller and Other Pieces (2007), Let Baby Fall (2008) and Windmills in Flames (2010). Raworth's 650-page Collected Poems was published in 2003, though a number of major works remain uncollected, and a collection of prose Earn your Milk was published in 2009 which includes the uncategorizable long out-of-print A Serial Biography (1969), a uniquely vertiginous patchwork of autobiography and fiction.
Several boxes of Raworth's notebooks, typescripts, and correspondence (ca. 1968-1977) are held at the University of Connecticut's Dodd Research Center.
and the U.S.A. and most recently in China
and Mexico
. He has made a number of recordings and videos. His readings are noted for his speed of delivery. He has long been interested in collaborative work and has created performance events and texts in collaboration with musicians such as Steve Lacy
, Joëlle Léandre
, Giancarlo Locatelli, Peter Brötzmann
and Steve Nelson-Raney; other poets, including Jim Koller, Anselm Hollo
, Gregory Corso
, Dario Villa and Franco Beltrametti; and painters including Joe Brainard
, Jim Dine
, Giovanni D'Agostino and Micaëla Henich. In 1991, he was the first European writer in 30 years to be invited to teach at the University of Cape Town
and he has taught occasional semesters in the United States. He has also worked with his wife, Val Raworth.
His visual art consists mainly of drawings, collage
and found art
and has been exhibited in Italy
, France
, South Africa
, and the United States.
connections. His mother's family lived in the same house in Dublin as Sean O'Casey
at the time that the playwright was working on Juno and the Paycock
. In 1990, he took out an Irish passport
.
Poet
A poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...
and visual artist who has published over forty books of poetry and prose since 1966. His works has been translated and published in many countries. Raworth is a key figure in the British Poetry Revival
British Poetry Revival
The British Poetry Revival is the general name given to a loose poetry movement in Britain that took place in the 1960s and 1970s. The revival was a modernist-inspired reaction to the Movement's more conservative approach to British poetry.-Beginnings:...
. He lives in Brighton, England
Brighton
Brighton is the major part of the city of Brighton and Hove in East Sussex, England on the south coast of Great Britain...
.
Early life and work
Raworth was born and grew up in LondonLondon
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
. He left school at the age of sixteen and worked at a variety of jobs. In the early 1960s he started a magazine called Outburst in which he published a number of British
British poetry
British poetry is a term rarely used, as almost all poets of the British world are clearly identified with one of the various nations within those areas....
and American poets including Ed Dorn
Ed Dorn
Edward Merton Dorn was an American poet and teacher often associated with the Black Mountain poets. His most famous work is Gunslinger.-Overview:...
, Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg
Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and one of the leading figures of the Beat Generation in the 1950s. He vigorously opposed militarism, materialism and sexual repression...
and LeRoi Jones. He also founded Matrix Press at this time, publishing small books by Dorn, David Ball http://www.literarytranslators.org/ball.html, Piero Heliczer :de:Piero Heliczer and others.
In 1965,while working as an operator at the international telephone exchange, Raworth and Barry Hall set up Goliard Press (later Cape Goliard), which published, amongst others, Charles Olson
Charles Olson
Charles Olson , was a second generation American modernist poet who was a link between earlier figures such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and the New American poets, which includes the New York School, the Black Mountain School, the Beat poets, and the San Francisco Renaissance...
's first British collection. These ventures into publishing made a major contribution to British interest to the new American poetry of the 1960s.
Development as a poet
His first book, The Relation Ship (1966), won the Alice Hunt Bartlett PrizeAlice Hunt Bartlett Prize
The Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize was awarded by the Poetry Society of London for a collection of poetry.-Winners:* 1966: Gavin Bantock for Christ: A Poem in 26 parts and Paul Roche for All Things Considered...
. Donald Davie
Donald Davie
Donald Alfred Davie was an English Movement poet, and literary critic. His poems in general are philosophical and abstract, but often evoke various landscapes.-Biography:...
admired the book and encouraged Raworth to resume his formal education. Raworth studied Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
for a year and then translated the work of Vicente Huidobro
Vicente Huidobro
Vicente García-Huidobro Fernández was a Chilean poet born to an aristocratic family. He was an exponent of the artistic movement called Creacionismo , which held that a poet should bring life to the things he or she writes about, rather than just describe them.Huidobro was born into a wealthy...
and other Latin American poets for his M.A..
In the 1970s, he worked in the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
and Mexico
Mexico
The United Mexican States , commonly known as Mexico , is a federal constitutional republic in North America. It is bordered on the north by the United States; on the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; on the southeast by Guatemala, Belize, and the Caribbean Sea; and on the east by the Gulf of...
, first teaching in universities in Ohio, Chicago and Texas, and later living in San Francisco where he was involved with the Zephyrus Image press. After six years abroad he returned with his family to England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
in 1977 to take up the post of resident poet in King's College, Cambridge
King's College, Cambridge
King's College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge, England. The college's full name is "The King's College of our Lady and Saint Nicholas in Cambridge", but it is usually referred to simply as "King's" within the University....
for a year. In 2007 he was awarded the Antonio Delfini :it:Antonio Delfini prize for lifetime achievement, in Modena, Italy. He now lives in Brighton
Brighton
Brighton is the major part of the city of Brighton and Hove in East Sussex, England on the south coast of Great Britain...
, Sussex.
His early poetry showed the influences of the Black Mountain
Black Mountain College
Black Mountain College, a school founded in 1933 in Black Mountain, North Carolina, was a new kind of college in the United States in which the study of art was seen to be central to a liberal arts education, and in which John Dewey's principles of education played a major role...
and New York School
New York School
The New York School was an informal group of American poets, painters, dancers, and musicians active in the 1950s, 1960s in New York City...
poets, particularly Robert Creeley
Robert Creeley
Robert Creeley was an American poet and author of more than sixty books. He is usually associated with the Black Mountain poets, though his verse aesthetic diverged from that school's. He was close with Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, John Wieners and Ed Dorn. He served as the Samuel P...
and John Ashbery
John Ashbery
John Lawrence Ashbery is an American poet. He has published more than twenty volumes of poetry and won nearly every major American award for poetry, including a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. But Ashbery's work still proves controversial...
together with strands from Europe
Europe
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
an poetry (Apollinaire
Guillaume Apollinaire
Wilhelm Albert Włodzimierz Apolinary Kostrowicki, known as Guillaume Apollinaire was a French poet, playwright, short story writer, novelist, and art critic born in Italy to a Polish mother....
), Dada
Dada
Dada or Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in Zurich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1922. The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature—poetry, art manifestoes, art theory—theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war politics through a...
, and Surrealism
Surrealism
Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....
. His 1974 book Ace saw Raworth move to a more disjunctive style, built from short, unpunctuated lines that entice the reader into following multiple syntactic possibilities, as they knit together everything from observations of the everyday to self-reflexive commentary on the acts of thinking and writing, to affectionate lifts from pulp fiction and film noir, to political satire. A series of long poems in this mode followed—after Ace came Writing (composed 1975-77; published 1982), Catacoustics (composed 1978-81; published 1991) and West Wind (composed 1982-83; published 1984). Subsequent projects have extended this mode into a kaleidoscopic sequence of 14-line poems (not exactly "sonnets") that extended through "Sentenced to Death" (in Visible Shivers, 1987), Eternal Sections (1993) and Survival (1994). Later collections include Clean & Well Lit (1996), Meadow (1999), Caller and Other Pieces (2007), Let Baby Fall (2008) and Windmills in Flames (2010). Raworth's 650-page Collected Poems was published in 2003, though a number of major works remain uncollected, and a collection of prose Earn your Milk was published in 2009 which includes the uncategorizable long out-of-print A Serial Biography (1969), a uniquely vertiginous patchwork of autobiography and fiction.
Several boxes of Raworth's notebooks, typescripts, and correspondence (ca. 1968-1977) are held at the University of Connecticut's Dodd Research Center.
Performance and collaboration
Raworth gives regular readings of his work in EuropeEurope
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
and the U.S.A. and most recently in China
China
Chinese civilization may refer to:* China for more general discussion of the country.* Chinese culture* Greater China, the transnational community of ethnic Chinese.* History of China* Sinosphere, the area historically affected by Chinese culture...
and Mexico
Mexico
The United Mexican States , commonly known as Mexico , is a federal constitutional republic in North America. It is bordered on the north by the United States; on the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; on the southeast by Guatemala, Belize, and the Caribbean Sea; and on the east by the Gulf of...
. He has made a number of recordings and videos. His readings are noted for his speed of delivery. He has long been interested in collaborative work and has created performance events and texts in collaboration with musicians such as Steve Lacy
Steve Lacy
Steve Lacy , born Steven Norman Lackritz in New York City, was a jazz saxophonist and composer recognized as one of the important players of soprano saxophone....
, Joëlle Léandre
Joëlle Léandre
Joëlle Léandre is a double bassist, vocalist, and composer active in new music and free improvisation....
, Giancarlo Locatelli, Peter Brötzmann
Peter Brötzmann
Peter Brötzmann is a German artist and free jazz saxophonist and clarinetist.Brötzmann is among the most important European free jazz musicians. His rough, lyrical timbre is easily recognized on his many recordings.-Early life:...
and Steve Nelson-Raney; other poets, including Jim Koller, Anselm Hollo
Anselm Hollo
Anselm Paul Alexis Hollo is a Finnish poet and translator. He has lived in the United States since 1967.-Life and work:...
, Gregory Corso
Gregory Corso
Gregory Nunzio Corso was an American poet, youngest of the inner circle of Beat Generation writers...
, Dario Villa and Franco Beltrametti; and painters including Joe Brainard
Joe Brainard
Joe Brainard was an American artist and writer associated with the New York School. His prodigious and innovative body of work included assemblages, collages, drawing, and painting, as well as designs for book and album covers, theatrical sets and costumes...
, Jim Dine
Jim Dine
Jim Dine is an American pop artist. He is sometimes considered to be a part of the Neo-Dada movement. He was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, attended Walnut Hills High School, the University of Cincinnati, and received a BFA from Ohio University in 1957. He first earned respect in the art world with...
, Giovanni D'Agostino and Micaëla Henich. In 1991, he was the first European writer in 30 years to be invited to teach at the University of Cape Town
University of Cape Town
The University of Cape Town is a public research university located in Cape Town in the Western Cape province of South Africa. UCT was founded in 1829 as the South African College, and is the oldest university in South Africa and the second oldest extant university in Africa.-History:The roots of...
and he has taught occasional semesters in the United States. He has also worked with his wife, Val Raworth.
His visual art consists mainly of drawings, collage
Collage
A collage is a work of formal art, primarily in the visual arts, made from an assemblage of different forms, thus creating a new whole....
and found art
Found art
The term found art—more commonly found object or readymade—describes art created from undisguised, but often modified, objects that are not normally considered art, often because they already have a non-art function...
and has been exhibited in Italy
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
, France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
, South Africa
South Africa
The Republic of South Africa is a country in southern Africa. Located at the southern tip of Africa, it is divided into nine provinces, with of coastline on the Atlantic and Indian oceans...
, and the United States.
Raworth and Ireland
Raworth has strong IrishIreland
Ireland is an island to the northwest of continental Europe. It is the third-largest island in Europe and the twentieth-largest island on Earth...
connections. His mother's family lived in the same house in Dublin as Sean O'Casey
Seán O'Casey
Seán O'Casey was an Irish dramatist and memoirist. A committed socialist, he was the first Irish playwright of note to write about the Dublin working classes.- Early life:...
at the time that the playwright was working on Juno and the Paycock
Juno and the Paycock
Juno and the Paycock is a play by Sean O'Casey, and one of the most highly regarded and oft-performed plays in Ireland. It was first staged at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 1924...
. In 1990, he took out an Irish passport
Passport
A passport is a document, issued by a national government, which certifies, for the purpose of international travel, the identity and nationality of its holder. The elements of identity are name, date of birth, sex, and place of birth....
.
See also
- Black MountainBlack Mountain CollegeBlack Mountain College, a school founded in 1933 in Black Mountain, North Carolina, was a new kind of college in the United States in which the study of art was seen to be central to a liberal arts education, and in which John Dewey's principles of education played a major role...
- British Poetry RevivalBritish Poetry RevivalThe British Poetry Revival is the general name given to a loose poetry movement in Britain that took place in the 1960s and 1970s. The revival was a modernist-inspired reaction to the Movement's more conservative approach to British poetry.-Beginnings:...
- Language Poetry
- New York SchoolNew York SchoolThe New York School was an informal group of American poets, painters, dancers, and musicians active in the 1950s, 1960s in New York City...
External links
- Raworth at EPC (includes extensive bibliography)
- "Tom Raworth", 9th International Literature Festival Berlin
- Tom Raworth's Home Page
- How Radio Works: Time, Identity and the Tradition of Dead Generations in Tom Raworth's Poetry by John MuckleJohn MuckleJohn Muckle is a British writer who has published works of fiction, poetry and criticism.Born in Kingston-upon-Thames, he grew up in the village of Cobham, Surrey, and has lived most of his adult life in Essex and London. After failing his eleven-plus, Muckle attended a local secondary modern...
Part Two Part Three Part Four - "Add-Verse" a poetry-photo-video project Tom Raworth participated in